Anger gets a bad reputation in religious circles. But the Bible is not squeamish about it. God gets angry. Jesus gets angry. The Psalms are full of it. Anger, in the biblical tradition, is not a moral failure. It’s a moral signal, or what one theologian calls “active displeasure toward something important enough to care about.”
So when you’re angry, it’s worth asking: what are you actually angry about?
The anger the Bible validates is almost always on behalf of others: the widow robbed, the orphan exploited, the vulnerable crushed by the powerful. The anger it cautions against tends to be inconvenience dressed up as injustice.
An honest diagnostic: is what triggered your anger genuinely a wrong done to someone? Or is it a wound to your pride, your comfort, or your preferences? The distance between those two things is the distance between the prophets and a snarky, 1-star Yelp review.
